Leaders warn on biofuels and food

Today, on the BBCNEWS:

Speaking at the UN in New York, Bolivian President Evo Morales said the development of biofuels harmed the world's most impoverished people. And President Alan Garcia of Peru said using land for biofuels was putting food out of reach for the poor.
Meanwhile UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is hosting a meeting to discuss European policy encouraging biofuels.
But as food prices climb worldwide, there is a fear that development of biofuels could reduce the production of badly-needed basic foodstuffs. The global prices of wheat, rice and maize have nearly doubled in the past year, while milk and meat have more than doubled in price in some countries.
Such rises, combined with high oil prices, are causing increasing political instability in less developed countries across the world. Food riots earlier this month in Haiti, which is highly reliant on imports of food and fuel, led to the deaths of at least six people, including a UN peacekeeper. There has also been unrest in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal.

"Biofuels" have shown great promise in weaning the world away from the use of petrofuels. They are supposed to be less polluting, renewable, and all that acreage (primarily corn and soybeans) will go a long way toward absorbing that excess CO2 in the atmosphere.
Not so fast, say critics in the science community. First of all, they say, there's no proof that "biofuels" are any better than their fossil-fuel counterparts when it comes to greenhouse emissions. The other concern is what it may do the planet's ecology. The rush to plant additional acreage for biofuel production could put rainforests at risk, deplete fresh water supplies, deprive wildlife of habitat and eventually, affect the world's food supply.
It comes down to deciding whose needs are greater: the 800 million people all over the world who own and drive automobiles, or the billions of others who survive on a day and already spend half their income feeding themselves.

Our global food crisis

Watch (in Italian) RAI Report

A few days ago Marco Revelli [Professor of Science of Politics at the University of eastern Piedmont] wondered how it was possible that the alarm launched by FAO in Rome on global food crisis in the closing days of the Italian election campaign was not taken into account by politicians. Right now, in thirty countries of the southern world, beginning with Egypt and Haiti, the population is in turmoil.

But during the weekend election in Italy one early evening a RAI Report dedicated to food was broadcast: importing a kilo of asparagus from Peru which is air-freighted to get to our flat, we were told, means leaving in the air six kilos of CO2; meanwhile we pay eight euros per kilo for grated carrots contained in a [plastic] tank, while those who produce it earn a few cents. But that price does not include even paying the cost that nature pays with the pollution of air, land and water.

Reports also gave some alternatives: Solidarity Purchasing Groups [and from that day hundreds of people have begun to question the promoters SPG], the "kilometer zero" food and restaurants, organic farming. Perhaps the model of industrialization of agriculture [and therefore the use of pesticides, the import of products not in season on the other side of the world, the removal of land to be allocated to agrofuels] all to the advantage of the multinationals' agrobusiness has arrived at the endpoint. Certainly, this food crisis and the interest of thousands of people wanting to consume good, healthy and equitable food, say that we can’t carry on like this.

Bruno Picozzi (in translation)

China is a polluter!

Today on BBCnews homepage there is an article claiming: China 'now top carbon polluter'
The news say that according to a report from the University of California, China has overtaken the United States for CO2 emissions, even if they do not know exactly when this happened.
But we already knew it...
A very alarming sentence says, "unless China radically changes its energy policies, its increases in greenhouse gases will be several times larger than the cuts in emissions being made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol."
But we already knew it...
The only possible solution, says some super-researcher Max Auffhammer, is a "massive transfer of technology and wealth from the West."

...mmm ... ...?!?

But is it not the Western Countries who, while possessing wealth and technologies in abundance, have until now polluted more than China?
Is it not Australia that, in proportion to population, is pollutinig today ten times more than China?
Is it not that we have cut our forests, polluted our rivers, contaminated our land, depleted our seas, destroyed our biodiversity? Is it not that we go around with antismog masks and die of cancer and liver cirrhosis?
Technology and riches are sacred, nobody denies this.
But is it not the solutions perhaps in a massive change in lifestyle by middle-rich class? Anybody has ever heard of sustainable development?
When will they stop selling us the miracles of technology, 1 euro the bottle?
Technology does not make miracles.
The solutions are always in our political choices and China is failing its environmental policies as we have failed ours. And for the same reasons.

Dear Chinese,
We offer you our technologies and our lifestyle. And our lies and the secret to live well with all of it: blame the others for your future economic, social, cultural and environmental crises.
Good luck!

The first post-Kyoto negotiations

Press release - Monday, 31 March 2008, at 11:03 am

Climate: The first post-Kyoto talks begin.

The first round of official negotiations for a post-Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions began in Bangkok this morning. "The world awaits a solution that is long-term and economically practicable," the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon warned in a video message to a thousand delegates from 163 countries, signatories to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (CNUCC). The objective of the five day negotiation is to mitigate the differences at the Conference in Bali last December that prevented agreement for laying the foundations for a new global protocol by next year. The Kyoto Protocol, signed by 37 countries (and not by the USA), expires in 2012. There is disagreement, however, about a possible new understanding among the major emerging economies such as China and India.

Two notes aside.
Firstly, we learn that the Conference in Bali in December 2007 failed, despite the widely proclaimed last-minute agreement and the wide smiles of all our politicians.
Secondly, I have not seen great attention from the newspapers to this story. Perhaps it is not interesting.
Who knows if they will al least tell us how it ends?

Bruno Picozzi (in translation)

Peruvian Amazon on sale

Vai al sito www.aiutalanatura.it/

I quote part of an article which appeared in Article 21 of January 29, 2008, entitled "Peruvian Amazon on sale". (Read the entire article, in Italian)

Peruvian President Alan Garcia has announced that he wants to sell to timber multinationals 8 million hectares of primary forest in the Amazon. According to Alan García only with privatization the forest can produce "oxygen, timber and work for the benefit of all Peruvians." But to make this announcement he had to go to Madrid, the so-called homeland, where he had the support of the multinational timber companies. This sale would finally exceed the limits established by the laws of the 1970s, which gave lands in concession only and not for sale, and only in small lots so that the state could monitor its use and encourage the traditional usage of the forest resources of the Amazon.

The privatisation draft of Peruvian Amazon regions is meeting strong opposition from the local people, indigenous and peasant communities that consider themselves not only excluded, but even at risk of extinction in a model of industrial exploitation of the forest such as the neoliberal model desired by Alan García. The Peruvian Amazon regions inhabitants traditionally live with an extensive model of forestry which coincides with long periods of rest of the forest. It is the model that has preserved the primary forest until today avoiding the primary forest depletion that characterizes large parts of Brazilian Amazon regions.

In reading the article I am reminded of what I have always regarded as an essential prerequisite to think about before any reasoning: it seems that in any financial or commercial event on a large scale – mega-concessions for exploitation, financial giants, hypermarkets or mega shopping malls, gigantic infrastructures, mega interventions on territory – the only real beneficiaries of all hyper, mega, giga, super enterprises of this kind are the major power groups in which the wealth of a country is concentrated, at the expense of ordinary people, of the needs, well-being and future of ordinary people.

Bruno Picozzi (in translation)

An Italy to be proud of.

Watch an example of the fight between evironmentalism and counter-environmentalism.

I was struck by an article of March 13, on La Repubblica.

A small but growing group of countries is competing in an unwritten race to be a "neutral country" in emissions of carbon dioxide. A race against the greenhouse effect that is ideally called "Carbon-neutral World Cup" and that, currently is headed by Costa Rica, Norway, New Zealand and Iceland.
Reaching the "neutrality" of carbon dioxide emissions means balancing emissions of greenhouse gases that are produced by burning fossil fuels, with something that is able to capture them, such as extensive forest.
These days Roberto Dobles, Costa Rican Minister of Environment and Energy, says that his country has been awarded the 'prize' having achieved the goal of being a "neutral country".

It does not matter whether Costa Rica is the first or not, this is not the news. In reading the article the many detractors of climate change came to mind: industrial lobbies, re-routed or ‘bought’ scientists, ignorant opinion-makers, irresponsible ministers and a lot of ordinary people, even educated, who do not consider this an issue worthy of attention.
I remember that I talked some ago with a middle school teacher, a good person, who said with conviction that man claims the power to change the climate on the planet while these are natural things to which we just have to adapt. This man should work in the small shop at the beginning of the climb of Salvator Rosa, in Naples, and then we could speak again.

I wonder: if only in Italy we put into action that beautiful law that provides a new tree for every new born, if we build better railways (not TAV but the regional ones!) rather than invest in highways to be given to Benetton, if the Park of Vesuvius magically transforms into a real park from the big tip that it is today (Bassolinooo!!!), if we were collecting more in recycling and less in incinerators (Bassolinooo!!!), more wind and less coal, if the middle classes would buy fewer SUV, if we turn off lights when we don't need, if the mentality of the people were less subdued to their immediate and exclusive benefit... Perhaps also Italy would be proud to compete with Costa Rica in the "Carbon-neutral World Cup" instead of despairing for the elimination of mercenary Inter.
Of such a country I would be proud too!

Bruno Picozzi (in translation)

Thinking globally, acting locally

This article by Stefano Varlese, National Coordinator of YAP Italy, appeared in Italian on Selvas.org on 9 December 2007. It talks of Equador as an experiment in regulated economy, participatory democracy, social redistribution, regional integration, socialism of the twenty-first century, and especially moratorium on oil extraction from the area ITT - Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini in Yasunì park. It is well worth reading all of it.

This is a passage from the article, in translation:

"This is not just an attempt to protect an area unique in the world for its biodiversity but the introduction of a new model that changes the way in which man, until now, has used the natural resources. We will experiment with a model that would allow us to live without oil, which is likely to be normal in the future; oil use should decrease right now because of the environmental damage that it causes. The challenge is not just about Equador but all humanity."

On the same topic, but from a point of view somewhat different, I point out an article appeared on Andinamedia of October 27, 2007 and another article on the Global Project on 12 November 2007.

The general framework of this problem is made clear by the campaign Saving Yasuní spread in Italy from the organization Asud